Quotes by Franz Kafka

The relationship to one's fellow man is the relationship of prayer, the relationship to oneself is the relationship of striving; it is from prayer that one draws the strength for one's striving.

"Anything that has real and lasting value is always a gift from within."

"Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come"

...disorder is the worst thing in small talents.

It requires enormous presence of mind or rather quickness of wit, when opening your eyes to seize hold as it were of everything in the room at exactly the same place where you had let it go on the previous evening. That is why the moment of waking up was the riskiest moment of the day. Once that was well over without deflecting you from your orbit, you could take heart of grace for the rest of the day.

"I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us.  If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?"

"The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind, that is the horror of life, the terror of art."

You can hold back from the suffering of the world. This is something you are free to do. But perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering you might be able to avoid.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.